By the time the last week of June arrived, he had done what he set out to do.
Second year curriculum: complete. Not perfect — there were areas in Potions he was going to need to return to, and his Transfiguration practical work had a consistency problem he intended to address — but complete in the sense that he understood everything that a top second year student should understand, had practiced the spells to a reliable standard, and had the theory organized in his mind with the clean accessibility of something properly stored.
He sat in the Room on the last day of June and looked at the bookshelves, which had shifted as he'd worked through them, the second year books retreating to make space for what came next.
Third year theory, on one shelf. The elective subjects he'd chosen — Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, and Care of Magical Creatures— on the other.
And on the desk, placed there by the Room with the quiet helpfulness of something that understood what he was thinking about before he'd finished thinking it, a blank notebook.
He opened it and picked up a quill and sat with it for a moment.
Plans for what was coming.
He knew the shape of the next four years with the specificity of someone who had read about them obsessively. He knew the broad strokes and many of the fine details and he had the particular advantage of knowing not just what happened but why — the mechanisms beneath the events, the decisions and mistakes and contingencies that produced each crisis.
He also knew that knowing was not the same as being able to change, and that some things couldn't be changed without changing other things that needed to happen for reasons he didn't fully control?
Harry had to face Voldemort in the graveyard. This was not something he could prevent — not without unravelling consequences he couldn't calculate. The blood magic, the anchoring, the specific shape of what that night created. He needed Harry to survive it, which meant Harry needed to arrive at it, which meant the path to the graveyard had to remain substantially intact.
What he could do, around the edges of that, was not nothing.
Sirius, wrongly imprisoned, wasting in Azkaban for a crime he hadn't committed. That was solvable. Not easily, and not without navigating a system that had powerful people invested in its current conclusion, but solvable in principle.
Cedric, who would be killed in a graveyard because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and because someone had decided he was an acceptable casualty. That was also solvable — pull him out of the tournament before the cup, by whatever means were available, and he walked away from that night alive.
Both of these required preparation he didn't yet have and information he hadn't yet gathered and relationships he hadn't yet built. He wrote them down anyway, because writing something down was a form of commitment and he intended to honour it.
He wrote other things. Questions about Horcruxes — he knew what they were, knew how many existed and roughly where, but knowledge and access were different problems entirely. He needed to be able to destroy them when the time came, and he had the basilisk fang and the basilisk venom for them
He had to go about obtaining as many horcruxes without alerting Voldemort or his allies or Dumbledore — who he respected but who he also knew would manage this in the way that a hundred-and-twenty-year-old man managed things, which was carefully and slowly and with a great deal of weight given to the greater good — was going to require its own strategy. That may change after observing for awhile but for now Dumbledore was to be left in the dark.
He wrote that down too, and then closed the notebook, because what the writing told him was the thing he'd already suspected: he didn't yet know enough to make specific plans. What he could do was prepare in every general sense of the word and adjust when the specifics became available.
He picked up the first Arithmancy theory text and opened it to the first page.
Two months this summer. He was going to use as much of it as he could.
He chose three subjects beyond the core curriculum to pursue as private study through the year.
Duelling, because knowing how to fight in a world where fighting happened with wands and intent and the specific physics of spell interaction was not optional for someone who knew what the next four years contained. He was not going to be outmatched in the moments that mattered because he hadn't done the work.
Healing, because the inverse was equally true. He was going to be in situations where people were hurt, and knowing only how to defend and not how to repair was an incomplete skill set. Basic Healing — field medicine, the kind that kept someone alive until a professional could reach them — was the priority.
Gobbledegook, the language of the Goblins.
This one he'd turned over for several days before deciding. He had significant Gringotts wealth now and intended to have more, and the history of wizarding dealings with Goblins was, not to put too fine a point on it, one of sustained misunderstanding operating in the Goblins' least favorite direction. He didn't want to be swindled. He didn't want to miss the nuances of a contract because he was reading a translation. And he thought, on a level he didn't fully examine yet, that there was value in being one of the very few wizards who extended to Goblin culture the basic respect of learning its language.
He found the relevant texts in the Room — it produced them without being explicitly asked, which continued to be remarkable — and added them to his rotation.
By the end of the one and a half months he had covered: all second year curriculum to a solid standard, the third year theory for his three chosen electives, the foundational texts for Duelling and Healing and Gobbledegook, and had begun to sketch the outline of what an educated magical person needed to understand about the world they were operating in.
It was a start.
He had always been good at starts.